Cory Doctorow's craphound.comhttp://craphound.com
Cory Doctorow's Literary WorksThu, 08 Dec 2016 22:01:50 +0000en-UShourly1Everything is a Remix, including Star Wars, and that’s how I became a writerhttp://craphound.com/news/2016/12/08/everything-is-a-remix-including-star-wars-and-thats-how-i-became-a-writer/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/12/08/everything-is-a-remix-including-star-wars-and-thats-how-i-became-a-writer/#commentsThu, 08 Dec 2016 22:01:50 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8192more ]]>
Kirby Ferguson, who created the remarkable Everything is a Remix series, has a new podcast hosted by the Recreate Coalition called Copy This and he hosted me on the debut episode (MP3) where we talked about copying, creativity, artists, and the future of the internet (as you might expect!).

Are you one of the many Star Wars fans eagerly awaiting the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story later this month? As you watch – and rewatch – the trailer, take a break to tune into Re:Create’s new Copy This podcast to learn about copyright and the role it’s played in the success of the fan-favorite series. As part of our ongoing work to elevate the discussion around copyright issues, the role copyright plays in our lives, and the need for balanced laws, Re:Create today launched Copy This hosted by writer, director and remixer Kirby Ferguson. The monthly podcast will bring to listeners conversations with some of the leading authors, policy minds, legal experts, and members of the creative community to take on the important questions and topics driving the copyright debate today.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/12/08/everything-is-a-remix-including-star-wars-and-thats-how-i-became-a-writer/feed/2Mr Robot has driven a stake through the Hollywood hacker, and not a moment too soonhttp://craphound.com/news/2016/12/07/mr-robot-has-driven-a-stake-through-the-hollywood-hacker-and-not-a-moment-too-soon/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/12/07/mr-robot-has-driven-a-stake-through-the-hollywood-hacker-and-not-a-moment-too-soon/#commentsWed, 07 Dec 2016 17:14:28 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8189more ]]>

Mr Robot is the most successful example of a small but fast-growing genre of “techno-realist” media, where the focus is on realistic portrayals of hackers, information security, surveillance and privacy, and it represents a huge reversal on the usual portrayal of hackers and computers as convenient plot elements whose details can be finessed to meet the story’s demands, without regard to reality.

There’s a problem with this: information security really matters, and practically no one understands it, and most of what people think they know comes from (usually terrible) media portrayals. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, used to prosecute Aaron Swartz, was passed after a Wargames-inspired moral panic about teenagers starting WWIII from their bedrooms, and the next president thinks that hackers are 400 pound guys in their bedrooms and wants to rely on his 10 year old nephew to thwart them.

The show excels not only at talk but also at action. The actual act of hacking is intrinsically boring: it’s like watching a check-in clerk fix your airline reservation. Someone types a bunch of obscure strings into a terminal, frowns and shakes his head, types more, frowns again, types again, and then smiles. On the screen, a slightly different menu prompt represents the victory condition. But the show nails the anthropology of hacking, which is fascinating as all get-out. The way hackers decide what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to do it, is unprecedented in social history, because they make up an underground movement that, unlike every other underground in the past, has excellent, continuous, global communications. They also have intense power struggles, technical and tactical debates, and ethical conundrums—the kind of things found in any typical Mr. Robot episode.

Mr. Robot wasn’t the first technically realistic script ever pitched, but it had good timing. In 2014, as the USA Network was deliberating over whether to greenlight Mr. Robot’s pilot for a full season, Sony Pictures Entertainment was spectacularly hacked. Intruders dumped everything—prerelease films, private e-mails, sensitive financial documents—onto the Web, spawning lawsuits, humiliation, and acrimony that persists to this day. The Sony hack put the studio execs in a receptive frame of mind, says Kor Adana, a computer scientist turned screenwriter who is a writer and technology producer on the series. Adana told me the Sony hack created a moment in which the things people actually do with computers seemed to have quite enough drama to be worthy of treating them with dead-on accuracy.

“Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free” is my 2014 nonfiction book about copyright, the internet, and earning a living, and it features two smashing introductions — one by Neil Gaiman and the other by Amanda Palmer.

But good things come to those who wait! Neil Gaiman’s 2016 essay collection The View From the Cheap Seats includes his introduction to my book, and the audiobook edition — which Neil himself read — therefore includes Neil’s reading of this essay.

Thanks to Neil, his agents, and the kind people at Harper Audio, I was able to get permission to include Neil’s reading of his essay for a remastered audio version of the audiobook (many thanks to Wryneck Studios’ John Taylor Williams for turning this around very quickly!), and as of today, you can buy the new edition for $15. As with every one of my audiobooks, this is DRM-free, and makes a snazzy holiday gift.

Here’s the 32 minute video of my presentation at last month’s O’Reilly Security Conference in New York, “Security and feudalism: Own or be pwned.”

Cory Doctorow explains how EFF is battling the perfect storm of bad security, abusive business practices, and threats to the very nature of property itself, fighting for a future where our devices can be configured to do our bidding and where security researchers are always free to tell us what they’ve learned.

The story, Car Wars, takes the form of a series of vignettes that illustrate the problem with designing cars to control their drivers, interspersed with survey questions to spur discussion of the wider issues of governments and manufacturers being able to control the operation of devices we own and depend on.

It’s pretty much the most beautiful treatment any of my stories has ever had online, and I love how it’s been embedded in a wider context.

– PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY –

‘We’re dead.’

‘Shut up, Jose, we’re not dead. Be cool and hand me that USB stick. Keep your hands low. The cop can’t see us until I open the doors.’

‘What about the cameras?’

‘There’s a known bug that causes them to shut down when the LAN gets congested, to clear things for external cams and steering. There’s also a known bug that causes LAN traffic to spike when there’s a law-enforcement override because everything tries to snapshot itself for forensics. So the cameras are down inside. Give. Me. The. USB.’

Jose’s hand shook. I always kept the wireless jailbreaker and the stick separate – plausible deniability. The jailbreaker had legit uses, and wasn’t, in and of itself, illegal.

I plugged the USB in and mashed the panic-sequence. The first time I’d run the jailbreaker, I’d had to kill an hour while it cycled through different known vulnerabilities, looking for a way into my car’s network. It had been a nail-biter, because I’d started by disabling the car’s wireless – yanking the antenna out of its mount, then putting some Faraday tape over the slot – and every minute that went by was another minute I’d have to explain if the jailbreak failed. Five minutes offline might just be transient radio noise or unclipping the antenna during a car-wash; the longer it went, the fewer stories there were that could plausibly cover the facts.

But every car has a bug or two, and the new firmware left a permanent channel open for reconnection. I could restore the car to factory defaults in 30 seconds, but that would leave me operating a vehicle that was fully uninitialised, no ride history – an obvious cover-up. The plausibility mode would restore a default firmware load, but keep a carefully edited version of the logs intact. That would take three to five minutes, depending.

‘Step out of the vehicle please.’

‘Yes, sir.’

I made sure he could see my body cam, made it prominent in the field of view for his body cam, so there’d be an obvious question later, if no footage was available from my point of view. It was all about the game theory: he knew that I knew that he knew, and other people would later know, so even though I was driving while brown, there were limits on how bad it could get.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/11/23/car-wars-a-dystopian-science-fiction-story-about-the-nightmare-of-self-driving-cars/feed/2I’m helping launch Echoes of Sherlock Homes at LA’s Chevalier Books tomorrow nighthttp://craphound.com/news/2016/11/15/im-helping-launch-echoes-of-sherlock-homes-at-las-chevalier-books-tomorrow-night/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/11/15/im-helping-launch-echoes-of-sherlock-homes-at-las-chevalier-books-tomorrow-night/#commentsTue, 15 Nov 2016 22:29:19 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8175more ]]>
In 2014, lawyer and eminent Sherlockian Les Klinger comprehensively won the legal battle to establish that Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain and available for anyone to use, abuse, alter, celebrate or mock; now with a new anthology of completely unauthorized Sherlock tales, Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, Klinger and co-editor Laurie R. King have shown just how much life there is in the old tales.

I’m one of the contributors to the anthology. My story, “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Extraordinary Rendition,” uses the Snowden documents I was the first to publish as the basis for a cautionary tale about surveillance, secrecy and corruption.

It’s just one of 17 stories in Echoes, which has been getting rave reviews since its launch earlier this month.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) night at 7PM, three of us authors (Gary Phillips, Anne Perry and me), as well as Les Klinger, are gathering at Los Angeles’s Chevalier Books for a launch, signing, talk, Q&A and reading.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/11/15/im-helping-launch-echoes-of-sherlock-homes-at-las-chevalier-books-tomorrow-night/feed/0Sole and Despotic Dominion: how a 20th century copyright law is abolishing property for humans (but not corporations)http://craphound.com/news/2016/11/03/sole-and-despotic-dominion-how-a-20th-century-copyright-law-is-abolishing-property-for-humans-but-not-corporations/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/11/03/sole-and-despotic-dominion-how-a-20th-century-copyright-law-is-abolishing-property-for-humans-but-not-corporations/#commentsThu, 03 Nov 2016 22:40:13 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8171more ]]>

In the 18th century, William Blackstone wrote the seminal “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” which contained one of the foundational definitions of property: “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”

Today, software enabled devices can and are controlled by their manufacturers long after they’ve been sold on to customers, and laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA make it a crime to prevent this kind of meddling. This allows companies to force their customers to arrange their affairs to the maximum benefit of the manufacturers’ shareholders, not their own, and to punish customers for taking steps that thwart the manufacturers’ business models.

In my latest Locus column, Sole and Despotic Dominion, I describe how this is a kind of new feudalism, in which the only “people” who have sole and despotic dominion are the artificial life forms known as corporations, and this new aristocracy makes us into tenant farmers of our toasters and thermostats, cars and pacemakers — and I describe how the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a lawsuit to make it legal to use your devices in the ways that are most advantageous to you, even if the manufacturers don’t like it.

If you make a gadget with software inside it, you can simply add a thin skin of DRM to it, and configure the device so that the DRM has to be bypassed in order to do anything that lowers your profits. GM uses it to prevent third-party mechanics from diagnosing problems in their cars (and VW used it to prevent independent researchers from discovering that they were cheating on emissions tests). Philips uses it to make sure that you only buy Philips lightbulbs to go in your Philips sockets. Google’s Nest smart thermostats use it to make sure that only they can extend the device’s features, so they can promise power authorities that when the authority turns down your furnace, you can’t turn it back up again.

This is almost too good to be true. Every company has commercial preferences that they wished were legal obligations. Now, thanks to a stupid law from 1998 and the proliferation of cheap computation, every company can make their wish come true.

This is an affront to Blackstone. If the mere presence of a copyrighted work in a device means that its manufacturer never stops owning it, then it means that you can never start owning it. There’s a word for this: feudalism. In feudalism, property is the exclusive realm of a privileged few, and the rest of us are tenants on that property. In the 21st century, DMCA-enabled version of feudalism, the gentry aren’t hereditary toffs, they’re transhuman, immortal artificial life-forms that use humans as their gut-flora: limited liability corporations.

Under DMCA 1201 rules, security researchers who learn of defects in covered products can be threatened, prosecuted, and jailed just for disclosing that the manufacturer made a dumb mistake (the manufacturers get to decide who can embarrass them by revealing those mistakes), meaning that the camera in your living room and the wireless insulin pump your six-year-old is wearing and the Internet connected car you’re driving down the highway every day are all reservoirs of long-lived digital pathogens that criminals are free to discover and exploit, but that security researchers are not able to tell you about.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/11/03/sole-and-despotic-dominion-how-a-20th-century-copyright-law-is-abolishing-property-for-humans-but-not-corporations/feed/0Interview with IEEE-USA Insight Podcasthttp://craphound.com/news/2016/10/19/interview-with-ieee-usa-insight-podcast/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/10/19/interview-with-ieee-usa-insight-podcast/#commentsWed, 19 Oct 2016 19:59:53 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8161
I was interviewed for the IEEE-USA Insight Podcast last summer in New Orleans, during their Future Leaders Summit, where I was privileged to give the keynote (MP3)
]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/10/19/interview-with-ieee-usa-insight-podcast/feed/1Talking about Allan Sherman on the Comedy on Vinyl podcasthttp://craphound.com/news/2016/10/13/talking-about-allan-sherman-on-the-comedy-on-vinyl-podcast/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/10/13/talking-about-allan-sherman-on-the-comedy-on-vinyl-podcast/#commentsThu, 13 Oct 2016 14:12:57 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8157more ]]>

I inherited my mom’s copy of the album when I was six years old, and listened to it over and over until I discovered — the hard way — that you can’t leave vinyl records on the dashboard of a car on a hot day.

I’m the “Honourary Steward” for this year’s Shuttleworth Fellowship, this being a valuable and prestigious prize given to people who are undertaking to make the world a better, more open place (“social innovators who are helping to change the world for the better and could benefit from a social investment model with a difference”).

Being Honourary Steward means that I help choose the grantees; I’m the second Honourary Steward, following in Joi Ito’s footsteps. I’m incredibly honoured to be a part of this; the list of fellows is nothing less than amazing.

The application process is simple and relatively painless; applications are due on Nov 1.

We are thrilled to announce that Cory Doctorow has agreed to be our next Honorary Steward, selecting Fellows for the March 2017 Fellowship round. As a journalist, science fiction writer, copyright activist and technologist, Cory brings a breadth of experience, combined into a unique perspective. We are excited to have him on board and look forward to him expanding the perspective of the fellowship. We support individuals to implement their vision for positive social change, with openness at the centre of their approach. We continue to look for applicants with a strong idea of the world they would like to live in and the contribution they can make towards it. Cory will help us identify which of the candidates best embrace openness and whose innovative idea has the most potential to make a difference in their chosen field.

“Desperate” is often the opposite of “open”: it’s when we’re in trouble that we’re most likely to compromise on our principles. How, then, did open become the default for so many tools and applications? Because when you use irrevocable open/free licenses, you lock your code open, defending it from anyone who would lock it up again—including a future version of you, in a moment of weakness.

Open licenses have served us well for more than two decades, but they need help if we’re going to survive the era in which computers invade our bodies and the structures we keep those bodies in. Cory Doctorow explains that we can lock the whole future Web open, if we do it right.

Last month, I filed comments with the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of Electronic Frontier Foundation, 22 of EFF’s supporters, and a diverse coalition of rightsholders, public interest groups, and retailers, documenting the ways that ordinary Americans come to harm when they buy products without realizing that these goods have been encumbered with DRM, and asking the FTC to investigate fair labeling for products that come with sneaky technological shackles.

In our open letter on DRM labelling – a letter signed by a diverse coalition of rights holders, public interest groups, and publishers – we ask the FTC to take action to ensure that people know what they’re getting when they buy products encumbered with DRM. DRM-free publishers love this idea, because where DRM-labelling prevails, customers overwhelmingly favour DRM-free products.

But DRM-encumbered publishers should also love this, because they keep telling us that people don’t mind DRM. One significant challenge to DRM labelling is that the restrictions imposed by DRM can be incredibly complex – a video may play back on most manufacturers’ displays, but not all, and not at every resolution, and not if the video player believes that it is running in a virtual machine or has been relocated to a different country.

What’s more, most modern DRM is designed for “renewability” – which is a DRM-vendor euphemism for a remote kill-switch. These DRM tools phone home periodically for updates, and install these updates without user intervention, and then disable some or all of the features that were there when you bought the product.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/09/08/if-drm-is-so-great-why-wont-anyone-warn-you-when-youre-buying-it/feed/0The privacy wars have been a disaster and they’re about to get a LOT worsehttp://craphound.com/news/2016/09/06/the-privacy-wars-have-been-a-disaster-and-theyre-about-to-get-a-lot-worse/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/09/06/the-privacy-wars-have-been-a-disaster-and-theyre-about-to-get-a-lot-worse/#commentsTue, 06 Sep 2016 17:57:42 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8141more ]]>

In my latest Locus column, The Privacy Wars Are About to Get A Whole Lot Worse, I describe the history of the privacy wars to date, and the way that the fiction of “notice and consent” has provided cover for a reckless, deadly form of viral surveillance capitalism.

As bad as things have been, they’re about to get much, much worse: the burgeoning realm of the “Internet of Things” is filled with surveillance devices that you can’t even pretend to give your consent to.

It’s possible that we can prevent the proliferation of reckless overcollection and retention of data, maybe by the eventual success of a few ambitious class-action lawyers, but that will only happen if we stop the accompanying plague of “binding arbitration,” which takes away your right to seek justice for corporate malfeasance.

You will ‘‘interact’’ with hundreds, then thou­sands, then tens of thousands of computers every day. The vast majority of these interactions will be glancing, momentary, and with computers that have no way of displaying terms of service, much less presenting you with a button to click to give your ‘‘consent’’ to them. Every TV in the sportsbar where you go for a drink will have cameras and mics and will capture your image and process it through facial-recognition software and capture your speech and pass it back to a server for continu­ous speech recognition (to check whether you’re giving it a voice command). Every car that drives past you will have cameras that record your like­ness and gait, that harvest the unique identifiers of your Bluetooth and other short-range radio devices, and send them to the cloud, where they’ll be merged and aggregated with other data from other sources.

In theory, if notice-and-consent was anything more than a polite fiction, none of this would hap­pen. If notice-and-consent are necessary to make data-collection legal, then without notice-and-consent, the collection is illegal.

But that’s not the realpolitik of this stuff: the reality is that when every car has more sensors than a Google Streetview car, when every TV comes with a camera to let you control it with gestures, when every medical implant collects telemetry that is collected by a ‘‘services’’ business and sold to insurers and pharma companies, the argument will go, ‘‘All this stuff is both good and necessary – you can’t hold back progress!’’

It’s true that we can’t have self-driving cars that don’t look hard at their surroundings all the time, and pay especially close attention to humans to make sure that they’re not killing them. However, there’s nothing intrinsic to self-driving cars that says that the data they gather needs to be retained or further processed. Remember that for many years, the server logs that recorded all your inter­actions with the web were flushed as a matter of course, because no one could figure out what they were good for, apart from debugging problems when they occurred.

I’m about to switch off my email until September 5 and drive to Black Rock City for 10 days of incinerating the dude.

If you’re going this year, drop by Liminal Labs — with whom I am immensely privileged to camp — and have some cold brew and say hi! We’re at 5&F this year (look for the giant steel gate, the flaming chandelier, and the flying car).

On this just-released episode of the O’Reilly Radar podcast (MP3), I talk about EFF’s lawsuit against the US government to invalidate Section 1201 of the DMCA, which will make it legal to break DRM in order to fix security vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things devices that, today, are almost invariable insecure, and are also designed to be as privacy-invading as possible (to create “monetizable” data-streams) — a brutal combo.

Auditing IoT products is a liability for security researchers

Think about the conditions under which IoT companies operate. Their business plan—the thing they show to VCs to get the money to go into the business—is to monetize data. They’re all designed with security as an afterthought. They’re all designed with the minimum viable security to make this product not immediately burst into flames after you put it inside your body or put your body inside of it. Even worse, security researchers face total, brutal liability for investigating these devices and telling people which ones are and aren’t safe. It is completely nightmarish.
New pro-security business models

Note: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing Bunnie Huang and Matthew Green in a case challenging the constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA.

One of the things that our DMCA lawsuit would provide for is a pro-security business model. Imagine if you could start a commercial consultancy that would come in and deworm your IoT household. It could come in and jailbreak all the devices and check their firmware loads, and replace the firmware loads with open firmware or patched firmware, or something else that sits in between. All of those things, all that commercial stuff as well, is currently off-limits, and would be available in the same way that you can enable third-party parts and services if there are no legal impediments. The hardware service and support market in the U.S. for all classes of goods, from lawnmowers to cars to air conditioners to computers, is 2 to 4% of America’s GDP. It’s a gigantic multi-billion-dollar sector, and in many cases, these are small and medium-size enterprises.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/08/25/talking-about-the-pro-security-anti-drm-business-model-on-the-oreilly-radar-podcast/feed/0Podcast: Live from HOPE on Radio Statlerhttp://craphound.com/news/2016/08/20/podcast-live-from-hope-on-radio-statler/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/08/20/podcast-live-from-hope-on-radio-statler/#commentsSat, 20 Aug 2016 13:23:36 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8133

While I was in NYC to keynote the 11th Hackers on Planet Earth convention, I sat down with the Radio Statler folks and explained what I was going to talk about, as well as bantering with the hosts about the relative merits of DEFCON and HOPE and the secret to managing cons and marriages (MP3).

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/08/20/podcast-live-from-hope-on-radio-statler/feed/0Podcast: How we’ll kill all the DRM in the world, foreverhttp://craphound.com/news/2016/08/17/podcast-how-well-kill-all-the-drm-in-the-world-forever/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/08/17/podcast-how-well-kill-all-the-drm-in-the-world-forever/#commentsWed, 17 Aug 2016 15:20:50 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8131more ]]>
I’m keynoting the O’Reilly Security Conference in New York in Oct/Nov, so I stopped by the O’Reilly Security Podcast (MP3) to explain EFF’s Apollo 1201 project, which aims to kill all the DRM in the world within a decade.

A couple things changed in the last decade. The first is that the kinds of technologies that have access controls for copyrighted works have gone from these narrow slices (consoles and DVD players) to everything (the car in your driveway). If it has an operating system or a networking stack, it has a copyrighted work in it. Software is copyrightable, and everything has software. Therefore, manufacturers can invoke the DMCA to defend anything they’ve stuck a thin scrim of DRM around, and that defense includes the ability to prevent people from making parts. All they need to do is add a little integrity check, like the ones that have been in printers for forever, that asks, “Is this part an original manufacturer’s part, or is it a third-party part?” Original manufacturer’s parts get used; third-party parts get refused. Because that check restricts access to a copyrighted work, bypassing it is potentially a felony. Car manufacturers use it to lock you into buying original parts.

This is a live issue in a lot of domains. It’s in insulin pumps, it’s in voting machines, it’s in tractors. John Deere locks up the farm data that you generate when you drive your tractor around. If you want to use that data to find out about your soil density and automate your seed broadcasting, you have to buy that data back from John Deere in a bundle with seed from big agribusiness consortia like Monsanto, who license the data from Deere. This metastatic growth is another big change. It’s become really urgent to act now because, in addition to this consumer rights dimension, your ability to add things to your device, take it for independent service, add features, and reconfigure it are all subject to approval from manufacturers.

All of this has become a no-go zone for security researchers. In the last summer, the Copyright Office entertained petitions for people who have been impacted by Section 1201 of the DMCA. Several security researchers filed a brief saying they had discovered grave defects in products as varied as voting machines, insulin pumps and cars, and they were told by their counsel that they couldn’t disclose because, in so doing, they would reveal information that might help someone bypass DRM, and thus would face felony prosecution and civil lawsuits.

I’m flying into Kansas City for part of Midamericon II, the 74th World Science Fiction Convention, and while there, I’ll be on panels, give a reading, and sit down with fans for a kaffeeklatsch.

Here’s my schedule:

Thursday:

Is Cyberpunk Still a Thing?
Thursday 12:00 – 13:00, 3501H (Kansas City Convention Center)
Cyberpunk hit with a big splash, but as personal computers became more prevalent, smaller, and portable, the genre seems to have faded. Or has it? Our panelists take a renewed look at the state of Cyberpunk at the ripe young age of 35.
Ms Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow (M), Matt Jacobson, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, James Patrick Kelly, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Friday
Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks, and Other Forms of Intellectual Property
Friday 10:00 – 11:00, 2502B (Kansas City Convention Center)
A look at the purpose of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. What is their historical purpose, how is the need for them changing, and where will they go in the future?
Cory Doctorow, Eric Flint, Allan Dyen-Shapiro (M), Sarah Frost, Lisa Macklem

An Idiot’s Guide Revisited, circa 2000
Friday 13:00 – 14:00, 2208 (Kansas City Convention Center)
It’s circa 2000 and authors Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroeder just published /The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction/. Fast-forward 16 years later, and the world of publishing has evolved, but how much has it really changed? Cory and Karl take a look back and discuss what they got right, what they got wrong, and how things have changed over the years.
Karl Schroeder, Cory Doctorow, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2016/08/04/my-kansas-city-world-science-fiction-convention-schedule/feed/0EFF is suing the US government to invalidate the DMCA’s DRM provisionshttp://craphound.com/news/2016/07/21/eff-is-suing-the-us-government-to-invalidate-the-dmcas-drm-provisions/
http://craphound.com/news/2016/07/21/eff-is-suing-the-us-government-to-invalidate-the-dmcas-drm-provisions/#commentsThu, 21 Jul 2016 14:24:09 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=8124more ]]>
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just filed a lawsuit that challenges the Constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA, the “Digital Rights Management” provision of the law, a notoriously overbroad law that bans activities that bypass or weaken copyright access-control systems, including reconfiguring software-enabled devices (making sure your IoT light-socket will accept third-party lightbulbs; tapping into diagnostic info in your car or tractor to allow an independent party to repair it) and reporting security vulnerabilities in these devices.

EFF is representing two clients in its lawsuit: Andrew “bunnie” Huang, a legendary hardware hacker whose NeTV product lets users put overlays on DRM-restricted digital video signals; and Matthew Green, a heavyweight security researcher at Johns Hopkins who has an NSF grant to investigate medical record systems and whose research plans encompass the security of industrial firewalls and finance-industry “black boxes” used to manage the cryptographic security of billions of financial transactions every day.

Both clients reflect the deep constitutional flaws in the DMCA, and both have standing to sue the US government to challenge DMCA 1201 because of its serious criminal provisions (5 years in prison and a $500K fine for a first offense).

The US Trade Rep has propagated the DMCA’s anticircumvention rules to most of the world’s industrial nations, and a repeal in the US will strengthen the argument for repealing their international cousins.

Huang has written an inspirational essay explaining his reasons for participating in this suit, explaining that he feels it is his duty to future generations:

Our recent generation of Makers, hackers, and entrepreneurs have developed under the shadow of Section 1201. Like the parable of the frog in the well, their creativity has been confined to a small patch, not realizing how big and blue the sky could be if they could step outside that well. Nascent 1201-free ecosystems outside the US are leading indicators of how far behind the next generation of Americans will be if we keep with the status quo.

Our children deserve better.

I can no longer stand by as a passive witness to this situation. I was born into a 1201-free world, and our future generations deserve that same freedom of thought and expression. I am but one instrument in a large orchestra performing the symphony for freedom, but I hope my small part can remind us that once upon a time, there was a world free of such artificial barriers, and that creativity and expression go hand in hand with the ability to share without fear.

The EFF’s complaint, filed minutes ago with the US District Court, is as clear and comprehensible an example of legal writing as you could ask for. It builds on two recent Supreme Court precedents (Golan and Eldred), in which the Supremes stated that the only way to reconcile free speech with copyright’s ability to restrict who may utter certain words and expressions is fair use and other exemptions to copyright, which means that laws that don’t take fair use into account fail to pass constitutional muster.

In this decade, more and more companies have figured out that the DMCA gives them the right to control follow-on innovation and suppress embarrassing revelations about defects in their products; consequently, DMCA 1201-covered technologies have proliferated into cars and tractors, medical implants and home security systems, thermostats and baby-monitors.

With this lawsuit, the EFF has fired a starter pistol in the race to repeal section 1201 of the DMCA and its cousins all over the world: to legitimize the creation of commercial businesses that unlock the value in the gadgets you’ve bought that the original manufacturers want to hoard for themselves; to open up auditing and disclosure on devices that are disappearing into our bodies, and inside of which we place those bodies.

Suing on behalf of Huang and Green, EFF’s complaint argues that the wording of the statute requires the Library of Congress to grant exemptions for all conduct that is legal under copyright, including actions that rely on fair use, when that conduct is hindered by the ban on circumvention.

Critically, the supreme court has given guidance on this question in two rulings, Eldred and Golan, explaining how copyright law itself is constitutional even though it places limits on free speech; copyright is, after all, a law that specifies who may utter certain combinations of words and other expressive material.

The supreme court held that through copyright’s limits, such as fair use, it accommodates the first amendment. The fair-use safety valve is joined by the “idea/expression dichotomy”, a legal principle that says that copyright only applies to expressions of ideas, not the ideas itself.

In the 2015 DMCA 1201 ruling, the Library of Congress withheld or limited permission for many uses that the DMCA blocks, but which copyright itself allows – activities that the supreme court has identified as the basis for copyright’s very constitutionality.

If these uses had been approved, people such as Huang and Green would not face criminal jeopardy. Because they weren’t approved, Huang and Green could face legal trouble for doing these legitimate things.